The Heirs of Odysseus, 800 BC–550 BC

Whether the early Greeks possessed as powerful a sense of identity as the Phoenicians is far from clear. Only when a massive Persian threat appeared to loom from the east, in the sixth century, did the diverse Greek-speakers of the Peloponnese, Attika and the Aegean begin to lay a heavy emphasis on what they had in common; the sense of a Hellenic identity was further strengthened by bitter conflicts with Etruscan and Carthaginian navies in the west. They knew themselves as distinct groups of Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians and Arcadians, rather than as Hellenes. There were the Spartans, proud inheritors of the Dorian name, who saw themselves as recent immigrants from the north. There were the Athenians, who insisted they were the unconquered descendants of more ancient Greeks. There were the Ionians, thriving in the new settlements across the Aegean, in Chios, Lesbos and on the Asian coast. The ‘Greeks’ cannot be identified simply as those who took delight in tales of the Greek gods and heroes, which were common currency elsewhere, especially among the Etruscans; nor would the Greeks have wished to recognize as fellow- Greeks all inhabitants of what we now call Greece, since they identified among the population of the islands and coasts strange remnants of earlier peoples, generically called ‘Pelasgians’ or ‘Tyrsenians’; besides, the Greek-speakers were themselves moving outwards from the Aegean and Peloponnese towards Asia Minor, where they would remain for over two and a half millennia, and towards Sicily, Italy and North Africa. How, when and why this great diaspora was created remains one of the big puzzles about the early Iron Age Mediterranean. What is certain is that it transformed the area, bringing goods and gods, styles and ideas, as well as people, as far west as Spain and as far east as Syria. The Greeks remembered these movements of people and things by way of often complex and contradictory tales of ancient ancestors who spread their seed across the Mediterranean: whole peoples at times reportedly boarded ships to be carried across distances of many hundreds of miles.